The Royal Bank of Scotland's cheque clearing system fell over this week after a massive mainframe failure at HP Enterprise Services (formally EDS).
An IBM Z10 at HP Enterprise Services's site in Stockley Park, near London apparently failed because microcode fixes had not been applied. The vendor's disaster recovery plan saw processes switched to an IBM Z10 in Mitcheldean, Gloucestershire, but this machine also failed to work, according to a report in UK techwire, The Register.
The problem affected several large customers, including RBS, which saw its cheque clearing system go down for at least 12 hours, causing a huge backlog, says el Reg, citing "insiders".
EDS was acquired in a $13.9 billion deal last year by HP, which promptly revealed plans to axe over 24,000 jobs worldwide.
The Register claims the Stockley Park hardware team, who would have made the microcode fixes, have all been made redundant, with a similar problem facing the Mitcheldean site.
In an e-mailed statement to Finextra, HP says: "We can confirm that a minor component failure interrupted operation of a mainframe computer at our Stockley Park site on Tuesday night, 15th December. Service engineers responded quickly to restore operation so that there was little or no impact to an HP client’s business. "
EDS mainframe goes titsup, crashes RBS cheque system - The Register